Recently, Acquired.fm asked Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang what company he would start today. Jensen says:
“I wouldn’t do it, and the reason for that is really quite simple (ignoring the company that we would start—first of all, I’m not exactly sure). The reason why I wouldn’t do it—and it goes back to why it’s so hard—is building a company and building Nvidia turned out to have been a million times harder than I expected it to be—any of us expected it to be.
At that time, if we realized the pain and suffering, and just how vulnerable you’re going to feel, and the challenges that you’re going to endure—the embarrassment and the shame—and you know, the list of all the things that go wrong, I don’t think anybody would start a company.
Nobody in their right mind would do it. I think that’s the superpower of an entrepreneur. They don’t know how hard it is, and they only ask themselves, “How hard can it be?” To this day, I tricked my brain into thinking, “How hard can it be?” Because you have to.
“How hard can it be?” Everything that we’re doing, “How hard can it be?” “Omniverse, how hard can it be?”
That’s really the trick of an entrepreneur. You have to get yourself to believe that it’s not that hard, because it’s way harder than you think, and so if I go taking all of my knowledge now and I go back and I said, “I’m going to endure that whole journey again,” I think it’s too much. It is just too much.”
The title of this post could also have been, “The entrepreneur’s secret superpower is persuading people that their goal is feasible.”
The trick works because it encourages you not to overthink and hesitate. Instead, it encourages a bias for action, which enables you and your team to learn more and build confidence. As Arnold Schwarzenegger writes in his memoir Total Recall:
Don’t overthink. If you think all the time, the mind cannot relax. The key thing is to let both the mind and the body float. And then when you need to make a decision or hit a problem hard, you’re ready with all of your energy. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use your brain, but part of us needs to go through life instinctively. By not analyzing everything, you get rid of all the garbage that loads you up and bogs you down. Turning off your mind is an art. It’s a form of meditation. Knowledge is extremely important for making decisions, for a reason that’s not necessarily obvious. The more knowledge you have, the more you’re free to rely on your instincts. You don’t have to take the time to learn about a subject. Yet in most cases, people who have the knowledge get bogged down and frozen. The more you know, the more you hesitate, which is why even the smartest people blow it big-time. A boxer brings a huge amount of knowledge to the ring—when to duck, punch, counter, dance back, block. But if he were to think about any of this when a punch comes, it would be over. He has to use what he knows in a tenth of a second. When you are not confident of your decision-making process, it will slow you down.
Overthinking is why people can’t sleep at night: their mind is racing and they can’t turn it off. Overanalyzing cripples you. Back in 1980, when Al Ehringer and I wanted to develop a block at the end of Main Street in Santa Monica, the investors we were bidding against for the property let their worries hold them back. We’d done the research, too, and realized there were uncertainties that might limit the upside potential. The land was an old trolley right-of-way and wasn’t available for sale, just for long-term lease. Land nearby was contaminated with chemical waste—suppose this land had a problem too? The property straddled the border of Santa Monica and Venice, so it was unclear which local tax laws and regulations applied. We didn’t dwell on these challenges, but the rival bidders did, and after a while all they could see was red flags. So they dropped out when we raised our bid, and we got the property. Within two years, we were able to convert the lease into a purchase, and our gamble started to pay off; 3100 Main Street turned out to be a phenomenal investment. Many movie deals are made under pressure, and if you freeze, you lose. On Twins we had a deadline: Universal needed to know if Danny, Ivan, and I were all committed. There was no time for the agents to dialog. Danny and Ivan and I made the deal on a napkin at lunch. We all signed it and left the table. Danny later had it framed.
One thing to consider, of course, is how much thinking and research you’ve actually done. Arnold’s definition of enough research (or thinking enough) is different from another entrepreneur’s. Thinking enough is not an objective point; it involves a sense of judgement. Consider the following quadrant:
Jensen Huang’s, “How hard can it be?” prompt involves a deliberate calibration of his estimation abilities—deliberately underestimating the difficulty of a task, and overestimating what Nvidia can do. There’s a sense of reality distortion here, similar to Steve Jobs pushing his team to meet an unrealistic deadline for the original Macintosh.
It’s worth considering that Jensen and Nvidia now have decades of experience and meeting with the best minds in the business. Jensen’s definition of “thinking too little,” and his wealth of information and experiences, might be similar to somebody else who has spent decades of research (so he might actually be in Q3, from somebody else’s perspective). Similarly, I’m sure there are lots of bets that Jensen doesn’t make, because he realizes, “This is too hard.”
A prompt like, “How hard can it be?” draws to mind the Dunning-Kruger effect (the cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities) and the fluency illusion (tendency for people to overestimate their abilities without sufficient evidence).
While it’s helpful in the day-to-day, betting the farm based on a prompt like this is risky. You’d want to consider how you can limit the downside. It draws to mind the literal example of Sam Johnson deciding to buy his family’s old farm, and failing to make a living on it—plunging a young Lyndon B. Johnson and his family into poverty. In Clear Thinking, Shane Parrish writes:
Our ego tempts us into thinking we’re more than we are. Left unchecked, it can turn confidence into overconfidence or even arrogance. We get a bit of knowledge on the internet and suddenly we are full of hubris. Everything seems easy. As a result, we take risks that we may not understand we’re taking. We must resist this kind of unearned confidence, though, if we are to get the results we desire.
I’m writing to think about this topic.